It is only right that an early post in a blog entitled “Grief Helps” should be about my own grief.

John Schneider

My extremely good friend and soulmate, John Schneider, died fifteen months ago. We shared a huge amount, personally and professionally—our separate kinds of knowledge, our complementary interests, our commitment to human caring, our belief in how the Divine can stir in human lives. We shared countless joys, abundant laughter, and not a few rotten jokes. Increasingly, we shared a dream.

We planned to do even more professional and personal collaboration as we approached the later stages of our lives. We would pool our common goals and our individual gifts to create resources for grieving people unlike anything that had yet been created.

This blog would have been one such collaboration. It is now coming into being without our working on it side by side. John would have added ever so much to this endeavor. Only I, perhaps, know how much better this resource would have been were he still alive. Writing this post, I grieve our lost dream. I grieve anew that irreplaceable relationship. I grieve the untimeliness of John’s death.

I spoke at John’s funeral that chilly April day. John’s wife and my good friend Sharon gave me a DVD of that service shortly afterward. Over a year later I still had not watched it. It seemed too painful to view that day’s events, to hear John’s favorite songs all over again, to listen to my own words composed for his hundreds of friends who filled that Traverse City sanctuary.

A few days ago I played that recording for the first time. I was right— it was hard to watch and to listen, as I stood alone in my office, tears streaming down my face. Yet now I also realize, once again, firsthand, how healing such tears can be, how positive even dashed hopes can turn out, and how a person’s spirit can transcend both space and time.

John could not be here in the flesh today as I make this entry in a blog he would have loved. But I have no doubt that John is still here. And I have no doubt that his voice and his influence and his teaching will lie behind all the words and ideas and images and sounds that will appear here in the coming months and years, should I be granted such time on earth.